November 16, 2005

Peshawar vs. Bay Area

This bit, from William Darymple's "Inside the Madrasas," was unexpected:

Under Sami's vice-presidency [radical political parties] have just imposed a Taliban-like regime on Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, banning the public performance of music and depictions of the human form. The one exception to this, bizarrely, is the image of Colonel Sanders outside the new Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Peshawar. This was apparently because the Colonel was judged to be sporting a properly Islamic beard, and so was spared the iconoclasm imposed elsewhere.

The Colonel's lucky. We're not half as forgiving here in San Francisco, where black-clad anarchists regularly throw hammers through the windows of the KFC on Valencia Street. Even if it is a strange place to put a KFC...